Terms of Service

1. Acceptance

By creating an account, browsing, messaging, buying, selling, uploading content, or otherwise using CounselorCart, you agree to these Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

If you use the service on behalf of a student, family, counselor practice, organization, or other person, you represent that you have authority to do so.

Checkout contracts, private-offer issuer contracts, counselor attestations, product descriptions, and other in-product notices are part of the agreement for the relevant transaction or account activity.

2. Marketplace Role

CounselorCart is a matching platform and marketplace. We provide account, profile, search, messaging, booking, payment, document, and recordkeeping tools that help students, parents, and independent counselors find each other and manage services.

Counselors are independent providers. They are not employees, agents, partners, franchisees, or representatives of CounselorCart, and we are not the employer of any counselor. No employment, agency, joint-venture, partnership, fiduciary, or similar relationship is created by a counselor profile, listing, match, message, booking, payment, verification review, marketplace placement, or use of platform tools.

Counselors are responsible for their own advice, services, deliverables, deadlines, communications, confidentiality obligations, taxes, licenses, legal compliance, and fulfillment. If a counselor gives bad advice, misses a deadline, fails to deliver, performs poorly, or violates an agreement with a student or parent, that is the counselor's responsibility, subject to any platform support, refund, dispute, or enforcement process we choose or are required to provide.

Unless we expressly say otherwise in writing, we do not supervise, control, endorse, verify all claims by, or guarantee any counselor, advice, document, meeting, review, school list, application strategy, admissions result, scholarship, test score, grade, or other outcome.

Profile approval, verification review, public listing, unlisted profile access, reviews, ratings, or marketplace placement do not mean that CounselorCart guarantees a counselor's identity, credentials, claims, service quality, availability, safety, or results.

3. No Professional or Admissions Guarantee

Information, feedback, messages, documents, reviews, and services available through the platform are for general educational and marketplace purposes. They are not legal, financial, psychological, medical, tax, or other licensed professional advice.

College admissions decisions are made by schools and other third parties. You are responsible for reviewing submissions, confirming accuracy, meeting deadlines, and deciding whether any service or advice is appropriate for you.

CounselorCart is not a school, admissions office, scholarship provider, testing agency, law firm, financial advisor, medical provider, mental-health provider, or emergency service. Do not use the platform for emergencies or crisis support.

4. Accounts, Eligibility, and Minors

You must provide accurate account information, keep credentials secure, and promptly update information that changes. You are responsible for activity under your account.

CounselorCart is intended for users who are at least 13 years old. Users under 13 may not create an account, submit personal information, or use checkout. If we learn that a user under 13 provided personal information, we may suspend the account and delete information as appropriate.

Students ages 13-17 may use the service only with involvement and authorization from a parent or legal guardian. If checkout asks whether a student is under 18, the answer must be truthful, and any parent or legal guardian information must be entered only after that person has reviewed and authorized the purchase, payment, service relationship, and electronic signature.

Counselor accounts and anyone selling services through the platform must be at least 18 years old and able to enter binding agreements. Parent account tools depend on student-granted permissions, and users must not misrepresent parent, student, counselor, school, authorization, identity, age, or legal-capacity information.

5. Payments, Refunds, and Fulfillment

Paid offerings, packages, document products, private offers, refunds, cancellations, chargebacks, disputes, and fulfillment requirements may be governed by additional checkout terms, counselor offer details, and platform policies shown before or after purchase.

Payment processing may be provided by third-party processors. We may delay, decline, reverse, or review transactions where required for fraud prevention, safety, legal compliance, payment processor rules, or platform policy enforcement.

Counselor payouts, connected-account requirements, tax obligations, licensing obligations, and service performance are the counselor's responsibility. Refunds or dispute outcomes may affect counselor payouts, access, or account standing.

CounselorCart may collect, deduct, or retain platform, service, application, marketplace, or similar fees from transactions processed through the platform. Counselor payouts may be reduced by those fees, payment processor fees, refunds, chargebacks, disputes, reversals, taxes, or other amounts permitted by these Terms, signed contracts, and transaction records.

Unless CounselorCart states otherwise in writing or applicable law requires otherwise, platform, service, application, marketplace, or similar fees may be retained by CounselorCart and are not automatically refundable if a transaction is refunded, disputed, charged back, reversed, canceled, or otherwise adjusted.

You may not abuse refunds or chargebacks, submit false dispute evidence, use payment instruments without authorization, bypass platform checkout, or route marketplace-originated paid services off-platform except as allowed by the platform-originated services terms below.

Disputes, refund requests, chargebacks, and payment reversals must be submitted in good faith. You may not submit, threaten, support, or encourage disputes, refund claims, chargebacks, payment reversals, or evidence that you know or should know are false, misleading, intentionally wrongful, retaliatory, or not based on a good-faith belief about the purchased service.

6. Platform-Originated Services

A marketplace-originated relationship means a student, parent, counselor, opportunity, offer, document product, package, meeting, service request, or service relationship that was discovered, introduced, messaged, negotiated, quoted, booked, purchased, or substantially developed through the platform.

You may not use CounselorCart to identify, contact, solicit, introduce, quote, negotiate with, or build trust with another user and then move the same or substantially similar paid college-application, counseling, tutoring, document, review, meeting, package, or related service off-platform in a way that bypasses platform checkout, records, support, or payment protections.

Counselors may not ask students or parents to pay by Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, PayPal, wire, cash, invoice, personal website, scheduling link, external store, or another off-platform method for marketplace-originated services unless CounselorCart gives written permission. Students and parents may not ask counselors to do the same.

This section does not stop counselors from serving clients they had a documented, pre-existing relationship with before first platform contact, advertising their independent business generally outside the platform, or communicating off-platform where necessary for safety, accessibility, legal compliance, or a platform-approved process. It does require marketplace-originated paid work to be booked and paid through the platform.

If we believe users are moving platform-originated paid work outside the platform without permission, we may suspend accounts, remove offers, withhold or reverse access to platform features, preserve records, and seek contract damages or other remedies available under these Terms, signed contracts, and applicable law.

7. Academic Integrity, User Content, and Conduct

You are responsible for the content you submit, including messages, files, profile details, reviews, legal names, signatures, meeting information, and documents. You grant us the rights needed to host, process, transmit, secure, display, and otherwise operate the service for you and authorized participants.

You may not use the service to break the law, misrepresent credentials or identity, infringe intellectual property, submit harmful code, harass others, bypass access controls, scrape private data, interfere with the platform, or upload content you do not have rights to use.

Students, parents, and counselors may not use the platform to fabricate accomplishments, impersonate an applicant, submit dishonest application materials, plagiarize, violate school or program policies, or hide material facts from a school, scholarship provider, employer, or other decision-maker.

Counselors are responsible for the accuracy of their profiles, screenshots, outcomes, reviews they solicit, private offers, service descriptions, files, document products, and communications. Counselors must keep student and family materials reasonably confidential and use them only to perform services, coordinate through the platform, respond to support or disputes, comply with law, or protect safety.

8. Reviews, Ratings, and Public Claims

Reviews, ratings, profile outcomes, testimonials, and screenshots are user-submitted marketplace content. They must be honest, based on real experience, and not fabricated, misleading, coerced, compensated without disclosure, or posted by someone with an undisclosed conflict of interest.

We may moderate, remove, label, investigate, or decline to display reviews or public claims that appear fake, misleading, unlawful, abusive, privacy-invasive, irrelevant, or inconsistent with platform rules. We will not require users to waive their right to post honest reviews.

A review, rating, outcome statement, supporting screenshot, or profile claim is not a guarantee that you will receive the same service, quality, admissions result, scholarship, award, grade, test score, or other outcome.

9. Electronic Signatures and Records

When a feature asks you to check a consent box, type a legal name, click a submission button, or continue to payment after reviewing a contract or attestation, you agree to use electronic signatures and electronic records for that transaction or account action.

Electronic records may include the contract or attestation text, typed legal name, signer role, account identity, email, timestamp, product details, order details, offer details, and technical records used to confirm acceptance. We may retain those records for support, payment disputes, fraud prevention, legal compliance, and enforcement.

You can request a copy of electronic records by contacting us. You may withdraw consent to future electronic records by stopping use of the service or contacting us, but withdrawal does not affect records already accepted or transactions already started.

10. Platform Availability, Third Parties, and Changes

We may modify, suspend, restrict, or discontinue any part of the service at any time. We may remove content, limit accounts, or block transactions when we believe it is needed to protect users, comply with law, enforce these Terms, or preserve platform integrity.

We are not responsible for losses caused by outages, delays, provider failures, email deliverability problems, calendar or payment provider issues, third-party links or documents, data entered incorrectly by users, browser or device issues, or events outside our reasonable control.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CounselorCart and the service are provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, availability, accuracy, or reliability.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, compatible with every device or provider, that any content will be accurate or complete, that any counselor will satisfy legal, tax, professional, or licensing requirements, or that any content or counselor service will meet your expectations.

12. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CounselorCart, its owners, operators, employees, contractors, and service providers will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, punitive, or lost-profit damages; admissions, academic, financial, reputational, or opportunity losses; lost data; payment-provider issues; counselor conduct; user content; or third-party services.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the platform, service, application, or other fees received and retained by CounselorCart from you for the specific transaction giving rise to the claim in the six months before the claim. This cap excludes counselor charges, counselor payouts, amounts paid or payable to other users or third parties, taxes, payment processor fees, refunds, chargebacks, credits, and other pass-through amounts. If CounselorCart did not receive and retain any such fee for the transaction, our total liability is limited to $0. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so these limits apply only to the extent permitted by applicable law.

13. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless CounselorCart, its owners, operators, employees, contractors, and service providers from claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses arising from your content, your services, your purchases, your account activity, your payment activity, your disputes, chargebacks, refund claims, payment reversals, legal-name or signature entries, your misrepresentation of age or parent/guardian authority, your violation of these Terms, your violation of law, or your infringement of another person's rights.

Counselors also agree to indemnify us for claims arising from their profiles, credentials, screenshots, public claims, reviews they solicit, private offers, services, documents, taxes, licenses, confidentiality failures, academic-integrity violations, off-platform routing, off-platform payment requests, or disputes with buyers.

14. Termination

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate access, remove content, or restrict features if we believe you violated these Terms, created risk for other users, submitted inaccurate information, created payment risk, or used the platform in a way that harms the service.

15. Updates

We may update these Terms from time to time. The updated version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Continued use of the service after an update means you accept the updated Terms.

16. Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent to counselorcart@gmail.com or through the support channels made available inside CounselorCart.